URL Cleaner (beta) (en)

This small Java program cleans URLs it finds in the system clipboard.

To achieve this URL Cleaner checks once every second the system clipboard for a new URL and, if it finds one, applies the active filters to it. The cleaned URL is then copied back to the clipboard, and can be pasted into an email or be opened in the browser.

At this time the following filter modules are available:

GenericWorks with URLs in which the target URL is separated by a '=': http://www.foobar.com/redirector.php?url=http://www.foo.com/ Examples: Google search results, external Facebook links

AmazonRemoves the referrer from product-links. This comes in handy if you'd like to pass on the link, or save it as a bookmark

The program can be paused via its tray menu so any URL you copy to the system clipboard is left untouched. You achieve the same effect when you double-click on the tray icon. In the tray menu you'll also find an option to make URL Cleaner the topmost window so it's visible all the time.

In the submenu 'Modules' you can deactivate single filter modules.

This program doesn't claim to be able to clean every URLs - for this there are too many ways to build valid URLs. So it's perfectly possible that URLs are touched that actually don't do any forwarding. Please simply pause URL Cleaner in this case. Please feel free to send me such URLs if you think accessing the site could be of interest to other people as well.

Running this generator requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 or newer. In most cases the program can then be started simply by a double-click on its JAR-archive. An installation is not necessary, the JAR-archive can be in any folder. URL Cleaner creates a lock-file in the application-data folder or in the user-directory to prevent two instances running in parallel. The lock-file is removed when the program is terminated. URL Cleaner will not create any further file on your system.

This software is distributed as Freeware under the GNU GPL v3, and can be downloaded here. There you'll also find the source code.

If you have questions concerning this software, you can contact me via mail or Google+.